by Philip Jett

“A simple faith in God is good enough for me, and beyond that, I do not concern myself very much,” Abraham Lincoln is reported to have said while president. Nonetheless, his White House was frequented by spiritualists at his wife’s behest. Though some warned the Lincolns of impending doom, none were able to save the president’s life or his wife’s sanity.

Spiritualism in the United States exploded during the Civil War, particularly in the nation’s capital. Fathers, husbands, and sons were dying on battlefields in this country at a rate never before imagined. It is estimated that 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers died by war’s end, or one in ten white men of military age. It’s not difficult to understand the desire of family members to hear from their deceased loved ones during such a terrible time, and few believed as strongly in spiritualism as Mary Todd Lincoln.

Having already lost her son Eddie in 1850, it was almost more than she could bear when eleven-year-old Willie died from typhoid fever in 1862. Mary locked herself away for weeks until she finally emerged donning black mourner’s clothes. “He was his mother’s favorite child,” Mary’s seamstress wrote. “Mrs. Lincoln’s grief is inconsolable.” At the suggestion of former First Lady Jane Pierce, who’d lost her sons years earlier, Mary invited well-known spiritualists, such as Nettie Maynard, to hold séances within the White House so that she might commune with her dead little boy.

Seated in a circle about a table in the Red Room of the White House beneath a chandelier with its flames doused, a spiritualist would clasp hands with Mary and her friends as someone played music to attract spirits from the darkness. Adept at deception, the visiting spiritualist typically conjured tapping sounds somewhere within the room to indicate Willie’s spiritual presence. The trickery worked. Mary was so convinced that Willie had returned that she reported to her half-sister: “Willie lives. He comes to me every night and stands… with the same sweet, adorable smile he has always had. He does not always come alone. Little Eddie is sometimes with him… You cannot dream of the comfort this gives me.”

President Lincoln was also deeply affected by Willie’s death. Intelligent and personable, Willie most closely resembled his father. “I stood at the foot of the bed, my eyes full of tears, looking at the man in silent, awe-stricken wonder,” Mary’s seamstress wrote of the president. “His grief unnerved him, and made him a weak, passive child. I did not dream that his rugged nature could be so moved.” The lamenting Lincoln often visited his son’s corpse in a temporary vault in Oak Hill Cemetery where he’d sit for hours, sometimes directing that his son’s coffin be opened. “Do you ever find yourself talking with the dead?” Lincoln asked a Union officer during that heart-wrenching time. “Since Willie’s death, I catch myself every day involuntarily talking with him as if he were with me.”

Despite his intense grief, President Lincoln did not resort to spiritualism. “He was no dabbler in divination, astrology, horoscopy, prophecy, ghostly lore, or witcheries of any sort,” wrote a friend. The president did, however, humor Mary occasionally by attending séances where it was reported that he had more interest in observing the tricks than harboring any real expectation of communication.

Some spiritualists warned Lincoln of assassination, but it didn’t take a spiritualist to understand the ever-present danger to the president. When warned once, the president replied: “Colchester has been telling me that.” Colchester was the renowned spiritualist, Charles Colchester, who frequented the White House at Mary’s request. It turned out that Colchester may have had special insight into Lincoln’s peril that originated not from the spirit world, but rather a few blocks from the White House. Colchester was a friend of John Wilkes Booth.

Booth’s interest in spiritualism began soon after that of Mary Lincoln. Following the death of Booth’s sister-in-law in 1863, the already superstitious actor attended a number of séances conducted by Colchester. The two became friends and many noticed the men consorting at the same hotels and eating establishments about Washington, D.C. After the assassination, Colchester fled the capital city and was never questioned about the president’s death.

Mary’s dependence on spiritualists naturally intensified following her husband’s assassination. After moving to Chicago with her son Tad, who died six years later, and her oldest son, Robert, she frequently hosted séances in her home until Robert forbade it. Undeterred, she visited spiritualists in Chicago using assumed names. She also visited William Mumler, a “spirit photographer,” who produced a photograph of Lincoln’s spirit resting his consoling hands on Mary’s shoulders. Though clearly fake, Mary believed it to be authentic. “A very slight veil separates us from the loved and lost,” she wrote a friend, “though unseen by us, they are very near.”

While the hocus-pocus of spiritualists may have comforted Mary, their shenanigans were not enough to settle her unraveling sanity. In 1875, Robert Lincoln caused an arrest warrant to be issued for his mother, who was taken into custody, certified insane, and committed to Bellevue Place, a private asylum in Batavia, Illinois. She remained there for over a year until she stirred sufficient public interest in her plight that she was released. She lived out her life quietly with a sister in Illinois and never forgave Robert.

For Mary Lincoln, the ghostly and chilling realism feigned by charlatans and swindlers could not rival that of her actual life—three sons died in her arms, a husband was fatally shot while seated beside her, and she was committed to an insane asylum by her sole living son. Few, if any, can imagine the assault on her reason inflicted by such real-life horrors—and none in their right mind would want to suffer her heartbreaks.

PHILIP JETT is a former corporate attorney who has represented multinational corporations, CEOs, and celebrities from the music, television, and sports industries. He is the author of The Death of an Heir: Adolph Coors III and the Murder That Rocked an American Brewing Dynasty. Jett now lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

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What did Viking clothes and outfits look like? A large grant supports archaeologists and textile researchers exploring and recreating authentic textiles and dresses

Recently, a group of researchers have begun exploring what clothes and textiles looked like in the Viking Age and how they were worn. Part of the project is to reconstruct a man’s and a woman’s outfit. Another part of the project is to examine how people from all sorts of layers of society looked like.

The research project, Fashioning the Viking Age, is funded by the Velux Foundation with a grant of 5.5 million kroner and headed by senior researcher Ulla Mannering from the National Museum in Copenhagen in collaboration with Sagnlandet Lejre and the Center for Textile Research at the University of Copenhagen.

From fragments to full dresses

Occasionally, archaeologists discover small pieces of textiles and fur attached to metal objects found in graves. Sometimes, they even find larger pieces as part of excavations.  The question, however, is how to reconstruct the complete outfits from these tiny rags

“It’s not easy to jump from small pieces of fabrics a full suit. It’s a puzzle game of small centimetres of textiles, images, and written sources,” explains Ulla Mannering, Project Manager on the research project and senior researcher at the National Museum to historie-online.dk

For instance, iconic pieces found in many female graves are the bossed oval brooches, which were used to hold up suspended dresses. But from images, we know that women might also wear blouses and skirts

“It is important to utilized a wide variety of different sources to find the breadth and variation of the Viking era dress. Much of our knowledge is based on archaeological findings from a few very rich graves,” explains Ulla Mannering.

A Practical Purpose

The team at the National Museum will not work alone. As part of the project, the researchers intend to reconstruct two outfits from the Viking age in collaboration with Sagnlandet Lejre and the Center for Textile Research at the University of Copenhagen. One is the outfit found in the Mammen grave, the other, the woman’s dress from Hvilehøj. Before they start, they intend to explore in detail which tools and materials the Vikings used, and which colours the outfits had. Both graves were high-status and probably linked to the elite surrounding the Jelling Dynasty. For instance, the burial of the Hvilehøj Woman yielded not only woven bands, but also four different fragments of silk, and six different fragments of wool as well as fur. The outfit of the man from Mammen sported a series of embroideries, depicting an acanthus vine, birds, gripping beasts, a leopard, as well as different types of masks. This particular outfit was reconstructed in the late 20^thcentury based on the clothes, which King Cnut the Great wore in an illumination from Winchester… However, the new project plans to rethink this reconstruction, basing it on a new study of the fragments from the grave excavated in 1868 respectively 1880. The textiles, though, were carefully drawn preserving details since lost. Linen, wool and silk, but also gold and silver were used in such outfits.

“We want to reproduce the textiles and reconstruct the outfits of these two graves using as best we can, using the ancient tools, techniques, and methods,” says Ulla Mannering.

The aim is to “develop a new approach to disseminate textile, skin and clothing design to be used for exhibitions, teaching and in popular visualisations of the multifaceted life in the Viking Age. The project will give Danish textile research a renewed focus and impact, but will first and foremost result in a new visual and tactile understanding of textile production and clothing in the Viking Age that can be used in museums, in research, and by the broad public.

The intention is thus to provide as closely as possible, re-enactors and museums with scientifically correct reproductions to be used in Sagnlandet as well as in the future Viking exhibition, currently being planned at the National Museum in Copenhagen. But also to inspire reenactors and living historians to be authentic, when recreating the fashion of the Vikings.

SOURCE:

Vikingetiden bliver klædt på.
Historie-Online.dk

Fashioning the Viking Age – a new research project

READ MORE:

Vikinger i Uld og Guld. Om de danske vikingetidsdragter, baseret på tekstilfund i grave.
By Charlotte Rimstad. MA, University of Copenhagen

Denmark- Europe: Dress and Fashion in Denmark’s Viking Age.
By Anne Hedeager Krag
Northern Archaeological Textiles: NESAT VII: Textile Symposium in Edinburgh, 5th-7th May, Ed. by Frances Pritchard and John Peter Wild.
Oxbow 1999

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Recently, a lucky punch from a detectorist resulted in the find of a very rare Viking coin. Soon, the find had multiplied to 252 coins, shedding new light on the rule of power in early Viking Denmark c. 800

Suddenly in August 2018, it was reported by an amateur detectorist that an extremely rare Viking Age coin had been found in a wet meadow not far from Ribe. The coin was a so-called ray-face/deer coin. On the obverse we find a crude face with staring eyes, bristling hair and a moustache. On the reverse, a deer or a stag, which kisses a snake? Or is the snake attacking the deer?

The newfound coin prompted the archaeologists to do a proper search of the meadow resulting in the discovery of a treasure trove of 252 coins in all. Of these, 249 presented a combination of the rare head/deer type, while the last three featured a beautiful rendition of a Viking ship with a fish swimming below the keel. The watery landscape had helped to preserve the coins, which seem pristine.

Technically the coins are categorised as belonging to the combination-group, KG 4. Accordingly, the coins have could be dated to c. 800-825. They were hidden in a bog or wetland at a time when Ribe was the most important emporium in Southern Jutland. At this time, Haithabu was still a relatively small settlement.

As of now, the Museum regards the find as a wetland-deposit intended as a sacrifice. However, already other explanations are proffered. Were the coins kept in a purse lost overboard by a Viking merchant crossing the marshes in a shallow barge? We don’t know as the exact spot has not yet been published.

During the excavation, the location of the coins was mapped with precision GPS. The resultant map showed that the coins were spread over a large area, approximately 50 x 15 m and in the shape of an oblong. The spread of the coins suggests that they were not buried, but perhaps just kept in a purse, which was placed (or lost) on the ground. Afterwards, repeated ploughing would have spread the coins.

First of all, it must be noted that the coins appear pristine. They must have been used as coins and not just as hack silver. The coins had not been tested, but rather intended to be taken at their face value.

Secondly, they were surely minted in or near Ribe. Marine archaeologists have long recognised that the inspiration for the coins with ships derived from Dorestad pennies. However, the ships on the newly found coins are obviously “Viking Ships” and not the banana-shaped “Frisian Hulcs” known from the Dorestad coins. As yet, we don’t know how many dies can be identified, albeit it is clear from the published photos that several are present.

This treasure is a new and significant contribution to the history of the period c. 800 – 825, explains the archaeologist, Morten Søvnsø, who is obviously exited about the new find. Not only does it complement the astounding results of the recent excavations in Ribe, currently being conserved and studied at Aarhus University. The cache of the 252 coins will probably shed new light on the political history of the early Danish kingdom of Godfred, he tells us.

Godfred

This king of the Danes was well-known to the Frankish chroniclers, who told about his exploits during the last stages of the Saxon wars as well as his repeated attacks on the frontier of the Carolingian Empire. Thus, in 808, Godfred was involved in attacks on the land of the Obodrites (present-day Vorpommern). This pillaging prompted the Franks to cross the Elbe to protect their border against, what the Royal Frankish Chronicle calls “the mad king”. In connection with these attacks, Godfred took a number of Slavic castles, as well as destroyed a trading place at the seashore called Reric, which

“because of the taxes it paid, was of great advantage to his [Godfred’s] kingdom. Transferring the merchants from Reric, he weighed anchor and came with his whole army to the harbour of Schleswig. There he remained for a few days and decided to fortify the border of his kingdom against Saxony with a rampart, so that a protective bulwark would stretch from the eastern bay, called Ostarsalt, as far as the Eastern Sea, along the entire north bank of the river Eider and broken by a single gate through which wagons and horsemen would be able to leave and enter. After dividing the work among the leaders of his troops, he returned home. “
From: Carolingian Chronicles. Translated by Bernhard Walter Scholz with Barbara Rogers. University of Michigan Press 1972, p. 88 ff.

Evidence of Godfred’s restoration of the so-called Dannewerk has not been identified. The gate, however, was recently discovered and excavated, demonstrating that the entrance into the Danish kingdom was heavily fortified. Although Haithabu was probably founded earlier in the 8th century, its heyday as the Viking Emporium par excellence dates from after 808 – 10. We know that the newly found coins belong to the same period. Hence, it is more likely they were minted at Ribe, which had an essential role as a flourishing market centre already from c. 720 and onwards (this early date is indicated by the as yet unpublished results of the recent Ribe-excavations carried out in summer 2018).

Might we presume the newly found coins were minted at Ribe at the instigation of Godfred and as part of his endeavour to develop trade in Southern Denmark? Earlier excavations have shown that Ribe was indeed a thriving market town with a money economy in the 8th century. Since the early 1970s more than 300 sceattas with their typical design featuring Wodan/Monster have been excavated at Ribe. More – as yet unpublished examples– have surfaced during the later years indicating that these coins were in use at least until the beginning of the 9th century. It seems likely that the idea of minting our new coins was fostered there; not least since the image of the ray-face on the new coins introduced c. 800 – 820 is akin to the “face” on some of the sceattas minted and found in Ribe from c. 725 and onwards. It seems logical to consider the newly found coins as representatives of those introduced after the scaettas were dropped c. 800 – 820.

However, even if the coins were part of a project to integrate the Ribe economy in the network of powerful Viking Emporiums like Dorestad and Haithabu – and thus minted in order to facilitate trade, commerce and royal customs – it is at least as likely that the coins also played a symbolic role in the fostering of the image of Godfred as a powerful king. As the litany has repeatedly claimed: “Kings strike coins, I strike coins, hence, I am a king”. What would be more natural for a burgeoning Danish king to utilise a central Carolingian symbol, coins, which he must have encountered not just as a partner in trading enterprises, but also as loot deriving from his continued skirmishes with Charlemagne and his sons? Especially, since he would also have been familiar with the minting and use of the sceattas in Ribe.

Christian or Pagan?

To understand the symbolic character of the new coins, however, it is necessary to consider them in their context.

Generally, it is believed that these Nordic coins were local derivatives of Carolingian coins minted in Dorestad. From 768 -790, these coins were fitted with the name of the king on the obverse, and with the place of the mint, Dorestad on the reverse. In 789 a new type was launched with +CARLVSREXFR circumscribing a cross, and with the site of the mint indicated on the reverse. However, late in his reign – after 800 – these coins were replaced with a new – more picturesqe – type, with the imperial bust of Charlemagne on the obverse, and a ship surrounded by the mint name, Dorestad, on the reverse. It is likely that such coins were part of the tribute, which Godfred received from the Frisians in 810. The cronicle informs us that it consisted of a hundred pounds of silver or the equivalent of 24.000 pennies.

Might we imagine that either Godfred or his sons had this treasure reminted at Ribe and according to specifications? A closer study of the different types of the Nordic pictorial coins belonging to the so-called compositions-groups 3 – 5 seems to indicate this might very well have been the case.

As can be seen from the newly found coins, the obverse is fitted out with a face. This face, however, seems to be an echo of the faces on the 8th century scaettas from Ribe (so-called series X) and not the profile of Charlemagne. The old epithet of Wodan/Odin should not be taken on face-value. This characterisation dates to 1860 and was originally voiced by a Frisian numismatist. In Italian, the coins are described as showing a “Testa di Legno”, head of wood, where the name “Wodan” has obviously been translated as “wood”(legna in Italian)! As these faces does not show two eyes, one of which is corrupted, we may limit ourselves to note that the portrait on the Caroligian coins differs radically from the one found on the Ribe-coins, which with its large and staring eyes decidedly reminds us of carvings on artefacts found in the Oseberg Ship from c. 834.

As said, the newly found coins show on the reverse ships sailing with fish below, as well as dears interacting with snakes. Other types of coins not found in the new assemblage, but belonging to the same composition groups (3 – 5), show images of Viking Halls, “redrawn” from Carolingian Temples depicted on coins from Charlemagne or his son, Louis the Pious. Other coins in the series show motives, which may be found on other scaettas from the beginning of the 8th century (the motives with a walking man or two roosters). Looking into the minor decoration on the coins, we should take into consideration that some of these iconographic details like the triskele can be found carved on the tent-stand found at Oseberg in Norway. Further, the four-legged deer, the coiled snake, and the ships remind us of paintings on the picture stones from Gotland. Obviously, the pictorial schemata are clearly Nordic.

Especially evocative is the deer. The animal reminds us of Eikthyrnir, according to the legend a stag, which stands on the roof of Valhalla and eats from the leaves of the great tree, Yggdrasil. From it horns drip water, which feeds the rivers and seas of the earth, among them Hergelmir, in which the serpent or dragon, Níðhöggr and countless snakes lives, feeding off the roots of the tree. The story is told differently in the Poetic Edda, Grimnismal, and Gylfaginning, but the main elements set the same scene.

However, another possibility is of course that the symbolic repertoire is Christian, as indicated by coins combining the motive with the stylish Viking ship sailing on a sea filled with fish. In the same way, the stag and snake on the reverse might symbolically render Jesus taking on the devil. On the other hand, this is contradicted by a die, which is not present in the new assembly: a coin with a ship on the reverse, and two roosters on the obverse. Of course, a rooster features in Jerusalem in the story of Good Friday. But roosters (in the plural) are also present in the Norse mythology, where three of them crow out a warning about the impeding Ragnarök.

A univocal answer to this complicated question is not readily available. We know, however, from the recent excavations in Ribe in 2018, that a Christian community was present c. 800. Three newly found leaden amulets or pendants indicates this. The amulets in the form of crosses of St. Andrew were found in the workshop of a metalworker together with the moulds, suggesting that the local market for such trinkets was not insignificant.

Might the newly found coins represent a syncretistic approach to the question of religion? Godfred and his Vikings would have been well-informed about the role, Christianity and the Christian church played in the Saxon wars south of the border. From 777 to 782, Widukind, the pagan leader of the Saxon faction, found shelter up north beyond the Danish border, we may presume at the court of the king. Later we hear of negotiations between representatives of Charlemagne and Godfred concerning refugees from the Saxon wars.

On the other hand, the designs of the coins are without doubt inspired by the Scandinavian artform named after Oseberg. Hopefully, the new find will in the future encourage not just numismatists and archaeologists, but also art historians to fully explore the cultural and historical ramifications of the 252 coins.

SOURCES:

En skat af Ribe-mønter fra vikingetiden ofret til mosens guder
By Morten Søvsø
Sydvestjyske Museer. Oktober 2018
(Press release)

The Hedeby Coinage
By Björn Varenius
In: Current Swedish Archaeology (1994) vol 2 p. 185 – 194.

Series X and Coin Circulation in Ribe. By Claus Feveile.
In: Studies in Early medieval Coinage. Vol 1: Two Decades of Discovery. Boydell 2008, pp. 53 – 68

Dorestad in the ninth Century: The Numismatic Evidence
By Dr. Simon Coupland
reprinted in: Carolingian coinage and the Vikings: studies on Power and trade in the 9^thcentury, Ashgate 2007, pp. 5 – 26

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by John Boessenecker

For fifteen years, Henry Johnson had his hands full as Wells Fargo’s pioneer detective. The company built its reputation on safety and security. From the time of its founding, it guaranteed delivery and paid its customers for all losses suffered in transit, whether due to theft, fire, or accident. The vast riches carried by the company were a magnet for robbers, and it quickly became evident that the company needed detectives to investigate thefts and recover stolen property. A common misconception is that the famous western lawman James B. Hume was the first Wells Fargo detective. In fact, San Francisco police officers Isaiah Lees, Leonard Noyes, and James Gannon, as well as Sacramento lawmen Dan Gay and Charles P. O’Neil, all worked as Wells Fargo sleuths long before Hume’s start in 1873.

It was during the Gold Rush of the 1850s that Wells Fargo officials hired Henry Johnson as their first detective. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1818, he was a lifelong law officer. Johnson joined the Glasgow police as a young man, in about 1840, and rose to the rank of detective at a time when the profession of policing was in its infancy. He later emigrated to Australia, where he served as a police detective in Sydney and Melbourne. Johnson and his young bride, Elizabeth, sailed by clipper ship to San Francisco in 1855. Within a year, he became a special policeman, paid by private businesses to protect their property.

American policing was then very new. Before 1845, there were no organized, professional police forces in the United States, for law enforcement had traditionally been handled by volunteer watchmen at night and by constables by day. As eastern communities became urban, the old system could no longer cope with the booming population and the resulting increase in crime, social unrest, and rioting. Philadelphia and New York City were among the first cities to form full-time police forces manned by paid officers. Soon these departments were divided into patrol divisions for the prevention of crime and detective bureaus for the investigation of crime. The latter became known as “detective police.” The result was a rapid rise in urban police professionalism.

San Francisco Police Detective Isaiah W. Lees, about 1860. He worked with Henry Johnson as a Wells Fargo detective. (Author’s collection)

But because of the transient and unstable nature of frontier communities, professional policing developed far more slowly in the American West. Only in San Francisco, where a small group of highly experienced career officers controlled its police department from the Gold Rush until the end of the century, did law enforcement reach a degree of professionalism by the late 1850s. There, Henry Johnson’s experience and talent as an investigator quickly became apparent. He was appointed a San Francisco police detective and worked closely with Isaiah W. Lees, destined to become one of America’s greatest sleuths. Johnson and Lees handled countless cases, from small-time thefts to major crimes and homicides. In that freewheeling era, on-duty San Francisco police frequently performed private detective work for banks, express companies, and merchants. Because American law enforcement was so new, clear rules separating public and private policing were often nonexistent.

Although Johnson later said that he performed his initial detective work for Wells Fargo in 1855, newspapers did not report his first such case until two years later. On the night of February 1, 1857, a thief entered the Wells Fargo office in Fiddletown, in the Mother Lode country. The office was located in a corner of the United States Hotel, owned by Jerry Kendall, and the safe rested at one end of the bar. The burglar opened it and stole nine thousand dollars in gold dust and coin. Because the safe was undamaged, the Wells Fargo agent suspected that the thief either picked the lock or used a false key. The loss caused an uproar in Fiddletown. Because of the lack of effective law enforcement, vigilance committees were very active during and after the Gold Rush. A band of vigilantes seized two strangers and strung them up in an effort to choke out a confession. The pair insisted on their innocence and were set free.

Wells Fargo officials then sent Henry Johnson and Isaiah Lees to Fiddletown to investigate. They found a typical rough gold camp in which saloons outnumbered every other business. One-third of its population of one thousand was Chinese. The camp had been founded in 1849 by Missourians. “They are always fiddling,” declared one of the founders. “Call it Fiddletown.” Stagecoaches stopped in front of the United States Hotel, the most imposing building in town and one of the few with glass windows. According to an early account, “The bar-room was also sitting room, dining room, and bedroom, the beds being potato sacks stretched across poles, furnished with blankets, but no pillows, a man’s boots being expected to serve that purpose. The floor was the original red soil, sprinkled, swept, and trampled every day.”

Shotguns and Stagecoaches: The Brave Men Who Rode for Wells Fargo in the Wild West

The company’s superintendent, Samuel Knight, went to Fiddletown also and promptly repaid the owners of the stolen gold. Soon after Knight and the detectives arrived, a lynch mob led by the Fiddletown justice of the peace, Stephen Kendall—a brother of the hotelkeeper—seized another suspect, named Stepperfield, and dragged him to the outskirts of town. He denied any involvement “and expressed the fear that if he was hung it would kill his mother and sister.” He asked one of the mob to write down his last words and send them to his mother. When one of the lynchers tried to comply, others shoved him aside and exclaimed, “The man had better be praying, for his time is mighty short.” Stepperfield was then strung up until he lost consciousness, then let down. This happened three times, until a local doctor and a deputy sheriff showed up and cut him down. He lived but was permanently paralyzed. It turned out that Stepperfield had had nothing to do with the theft.

Johnson and Lees ignored the vigilantes’ primitive attempts to solve the crime by strangulation, and they soon left Fiddletown to pursue a lead in Sacramento. While they were gone, a loafer known as “Drunken Joe” came forward with crucial information. He had been allowed to sleep in a room next to the hotel bar, and on the night of the theft, he awoke and saw the justice, Kendall, remove several sacks from the safe and hand them to a carpenter named Leroy Warden and another man, whom he did not know. Because Kendall was authorized to open the safe, Drunken Joe thought nothing of it until he saw the justice leading the lynch mob. Justice Kendall, Leroy Warden, and a ruffian called “Big John” were all jailed. One of them revealed the location of the gold, which was found hidden under a brick oven behind the hotel. Kendall and Warden were brought to trial in June and both were acquitted, illustrating that justice was extremely uneven during the Gold Rush: Innocent men were strangled half to death by a mob, while the guilty culprits went free. Though Henry Johnson did not crack the case, it marked the beginning of many investigations he would make for Wells Fargo.

JOHN BOESSENECKER, a San Francisco trial lawyer and former police officer, is considered one of the leading authorities on crime and law enforcement in the Old West. He is the award-winning author of several books, including the New York Times bestselling Texas Ranger. In 2011 and 2013, True West magazine named Boessenecker Best Nonfiction Writer. He has appeared frequently as a historical commentator on PBS, The History Channel, A&E, and other networks.

The post The First Wells Fargo Detective appeared first on The History Reader.

by Bradley W. Hart

In November 1938, one of America’s most famous radio personalities took to the airwaves on a Sunday afternoon, as he had done for years. Unlike the talk shows of later years, this host would not be taking calls from his fans. On this occasion, the host opened his show with the usual church choir and organ music, before launching into a startling defense of Nazi Germany’s treatment of the Jews. Though he claimed to oppose any form of religious discrimination, the host proclaimed that recent violence against the German Jewish community was merely a response to the threat posed by Communism. He went on to name two dozen Jews he claimed had helped bring about the Russian Revolution back in 1917, before concluding that Jews had risen to “high places in radio, press and finance” and were now feeling a backlash.

This was the radio show of Father Charles Coughlin, one of America’s most infamous radio personalities of all time. From 1926 until 1940, Coughlin hosted a Sunday radio program that often focused more on politics than matters of faith. He would eventually see himself as the voice of millions of disaffected Americans who had lost everything in the Depression, and saw no improvement in sight. This populism gathered him what may have been the largest audience in American radio history, if not world history. While we don’t have accurate audience information from the 1930s, polling suggests that Coughlin’s monthly audience may have been as large as 29 million people, with about half that listening on a weekly basis. This meant his audience was much larger than any other talk show hosts’ before or since. By 1938 Coughlin had convinced millions of Americans that he understood their problems as no one else could and was giving them a voice.

Coughlin was now espousing a political ideology of his own concoction, and it bore remarkable similarities to Nazism.

The “Radio Priest” — as he was known — came from humble beginnings. Coughlin himself was actually Canadian and was born in Ontario. He entered the seminary and was apparently an outstanding student. After entering the priesthood he was appointed to a small shrine — called the Shrine of the Little Flower — in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak. This was an area known for its Ku Klux Klan presence, and local members welcomed the new priest by burning a cross on his front lawn. Coughlin came to believe that the best way to combat prejudice was by making his church popular, and a few months later he invited big-name baseball players, including the Catholic Babe Ruth, for a visit. The event not only gained Coughlin positive press coverage, but also raised his profile in the community.

Using the new technology of radio to reach the masses fit well with Coughlin’s efforts to spread his message. In October 1926, Coughlin made his first regional broadcast at the age of 35, and was widely regarded as a hit. His voice registered well on the radio, and he spoke slowly and deeply. Even today, listening to a recording of Coughlin’s broadcasts is somehow mesmerizing. From a purely performance standpoint, it’s easy to see why Americans were entranced by his broadcasts. In the early years, most of Coughlin’s shows focused on religious issues and the scriptures, but that all changed with the stock market crash of 1929. From 1930 onward, Coughlin’s weekly broadcasts were decidedly political. The audience seemed to love it, and donations flooded into Coughlin’s church. So much money was arriving that Coughlin had to hire a small army of clerks to process it all. In 1930, the Radio Priest signed a deal with the CBS Radio Network to take his show nationwide and reach 40 million potential listeners. An obscure parish priest had managed to become a household name in just a few years.

Continue reading Who Was Father Charles Coughlin? on the Unknown History channel at Quick and Dirty Tips. Or listen to the full episode below.

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by Karen Bartlett

When Hartmut Topf was a small boy, he was captivated by puppets. On a warm summer’s day in 1930s Berlin, he would sit with his sisters under the blossom of the fruit tree in the family’s back garden while their otherwise rather taciturn father acted out puppet shows through the dining room window. With Hitler in power, the city was already in the grip of the Third Reich, but the horrors of that regime remained hidden from Hartmut, who enjoyed collecting and swapping Nazi belt-buckles, badges and toy planes with boyish enthusiasm.

At night Hartmut lay in bed beneath a wooden puppet carved by the father of his friend Hans—dreaming of that other world that puppet theatre could take him to; a world where he could express all of his thoughts and feelings, where he could soar or even die on stage. Not a world of silence and secrets, where his father and uncle whispered their worries for the future, and one day his friend Hans would simply vanish—and Hartmut would know to never question where he had gone.

In “Architects of Death” Hartmut Topf returns to his childhood memories, peels back the layers of his complicated family history, and explores the legacy of bearing the name of an industrial dynasty who engineered the cremation ovens used in the Holocaust. As that young boy in Berlin, Hartmut knew only that his family was related to the esteemed Topf and Sons—an industrial malting and furnace company in his father’s hometown of Erfurt. It would not be until the war was over, and his father had vanished as a Soviet prisoner of war, that he would discover the truth. Sitting in a darkened cinema, Hartmut saw the name Topf and Sons stamped in iron above the cremation ovens of a concentration camp. Millions of people had been murdered, and then cremated, using Topf and Sons technology. For Hartmut, it would mean a lifetime of trying to piece together the story of what Topf and Sons had done, and what role his relations, and their employees, had played in designing and driving the Holocaust.

While Hartmut was still enjoying a carefree childhood in Berlin, one man, wearing a dark suit and a stiff white collar, sat down in his office in Erfurt in the Spring of 1939 to draw up a plan for what he neatly named the first “mobile oil-heated cremation oven” to be delivered to the nearby concentration camp of Buchenwald.

This man was the engineer Kurt Prufer, and he carefully marked on his design “incineration chamber” rather than “cremation chamber” for he completely understood the power of his words. With a few strokes of his pen, his bland description disguised the red line between his previous work, serving the life and death of an ordinary community—and building the technology to fuel mass murder.

An 1891 advertisement for a Topf and Sons patented brewery heating system. Image is in the public domain via Wikipedia.

Prufer worked for Topf and Sons, at the time of the war under the leadership of Ludwig and Ernst Wolfgang Topf, two of Hartmut”s second cousins. During the 1930s Topf and Sons had branched out into building ovens for civil crematoria and both Prufer and his boss, Ludwig Topf, considered themselves the leading lights of a new movement to bring dignity to death and reverence to human remains. The product they developed and sold throughout Europe was lauded in a company brochure as “the purest expression of perfection in cremation technology”, promising an odorless smokeless, dispatch of human bodies, which were burned solely in super-heated air.

Topf and Sons’ work for the SS in serving the Nazi’s concentration camps was quite different: here Prufer and his colleagues stood with watches in front of the gas chambers of Auschwitz timing the death and incineration of thousands of victims to perfect a more efficient killing technique. Bodies were shoveled one on top of another into a single chamber, and burned directly in the flames—their ashes unidentifiable and intermingling. Yet they remained careful to maintain the falsehood that there was some dignity in death—Topf and Sons also supplied false firebricks and urns for non-Jewish victims whose families were allowed to claim their remains. In reality, mixed ashes, sawdust and general dust were shoveled indiscriminately into each urn which was then stamped with a false identity number (the families of Jewish victims were not even allowed the comfort of this lie).

These were the men and women of Topf and Sons: the engineers who drew up the plans, the secretaries who saw the memos, the accounts department who stamped the orders, and the playboy Directors, Ernst Wolfgang and Ludwig Topf, who signed every letter to the SS with the words, “always at your service”. These were the office-workers who gave the green light to the Holocaust, yet they were far from fervent Nazis.

Astonishingly, from the 1930s until the end of World War II, Topf and Sons was a hotbed of Nazi opposition, housing workers who were often knowingly part of the communist-resistance, while the Topf brothers themselves sheltered several half-Jewish employees, including one, Willy Wiemokli, who saw the plans for the crematoria at Auschwitz. After the war, Wiemokli discovered that his own father had been murdered at Auschwitz, and most likely burned in an oven built and installed by Topf and Sons—yet he still spoke out in defense of his former employers, supplying a statement outlining how he had believed Ernst Wolfgang Topf had protected him.

Both the Topf brothers and Kurt Prufer joined the Nazi party in April 1934, the last possible moment when it was acceptable to do so for any ambitious business person in the Third Reich. Yet rather than expressing horror and terror when they discovered the true purpose of the Topf and Sons contracts with the SS, they reacted with total indifference towards the suffering of their victims.

After developing the first crematoria for Buchenwald, Kurt Prufer wrote to his employers demanding a bonus for work he had proudly pursued “in his own free time.” His wish was granted.  “Rest assured” Ernst Wolfgang Topf wrote to the SS in November 1941, the company will provide a new design for crematoria at Auschwitz which will “improve efficiency” even taking into consideration the likelihood of “frozen corpses.”

An office feud between Kurt Prufer and his senior manager, Fritz Sander, prompted the latter to invent his own design for a concentration camp oven. Sander’s plan for a “Corpse Incineration Oven for Mass Operation” seems almost a replication of hell, where piles of corpses are shoveled down into a ring of fire and the bodies are used as fuel to continuously burn other bodies. In a memo, Sander, who had previously shown no interest in cremation ovens at all, described the process to his employers as a superb way or “restoring hygiene” in “war-related conditions.”  The Topf brothers, more interested in funding their lavish lifestyle, drinking and womanizing, approved it without comment. Only Kurt Prufer took issue with the design, claiming that it would not work in practice—and coming up with his own alternative equally deplorable design instead.

The work of Topf and Sons was no longer just enabling the Holocaust; Prufer and the Topf brothers were now taking the initiative in encouraging the SS to go further in their murderous regime, designing more efficient ventilation systems for the gas chambers at Auschwitz so that they could kill more people. By January 1945, the end was near, but even in the final days Kurt Prufer and Topf and Sons planned to recreate the killing system at Auschwitz at Mauthausen camp in Austria where they relished the prospect of fully taking control on an entire “extermination center.”

In every bland description and technocrats” lie Topf and Sons remained supremely indifferent to their de-humanized victims. The final statements of these men, as they were held to account for their actions after the war, showed that they had never once considered the millions of victims of their technology. During his interrogation by Soviet forces, Kurt Prufer calmly lied about his role in the process, and then, when pressed about whether he knew that innocent people were being murdered and burned in his ovens, eventually replied—“Yes I knew that.”  Fritz Sander described with some pride his “Corpse Incineration Oven for Mass Operation” and then stated, “As a German engineer and employee of the Topf company, I felt it was my duty to help Hitler’s Germany to victory, even if that resulted in the annihilation of people.”

A Holocaust museum and education center opened in the former Topf and Sons administration building on January 27, 2011. Image is in the public domain via Wikipedia.

As Hartmut Topf grew up as a young man in West Germany those questions of duty and responsibility would continue to haunt him. While the rest of his family remained silent, he was determined to expose the truth behind the lie perpetrated by his cousin, Ernst Wolfgang Topf, that “No one in our company was guilty of anything at all.”  Today, thanks to the work of Hartmut Topf and a small group of supporters, the building that was once the headquarters of Topf and Sons is a memorial to the victims of their crimes, and an archive of the company’s grim innovations is preserved for all to read and consider.  He says:  “I inherited the name. I did not inherit the company, fortunately. Even so, I felt an obligation. As a child, I bathed in the glory of being a Topf, and now I feel I have to tell the horror story of their infamy. I have to make my contribution. That is my responsibility.”

KAREN BARTLETT is a writer and journalist based in London. She has written extensively for the Sunday Times, The Times, The Guardian, and WIRED from Africa, India, and the US, and has presented and produced for BBC Radio. Most recently, she worked with Eva Schloss, writing her Sunday Times bestselling autobiography After Auschwitz: A Story of Heartbreak and Survival by the Stepsister of Anne Frank.

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North-Western Europe is currently teeming with new Viking museums and exhibitions. In the crucible is the huge renovation of the museum at Bygdoy in Oslo and Copenhagen is finally planning to exhibit its grand collections, the Viking exhibition in Stockholm recently reopened. While we wait, a new publication offers a fine introduction to the material culture of the Vikings.

Pocket Museum: Vikings
by Dr Steve Ashby and Alison Leonard
Thames and Hudson Ltd 
ISBN-10: 0500052069
ISBN-13: 978-0500052068

Pocket Museum: Vikings brings together nearly 200 of the most remarkable artefacts that are held in museum collections around the world. Although the popular image of the Vikings is one of wild, violent raiders, the objects in this book reveal a more complex society comprised of pioneering explorers and master metalworkers who established a far-reaching trade network. From the vast Oseberg ship to a tiny valkyrie pendant, and from simple wooden panpipes to the unparalleled collection of silver items in the Spillings Hoard, each object provides an important insight into this most fascinating of cultures. This juxtaposition of the elite and the everyday makes this volume unique in its field.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

• Introduction
• The Early Viking Age
• The Middle Viking Age – Towns, Trade and
  the Tenth Century
• The Late Viking Age: Conquest, Colony and Conversion

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Steven Ashby

Steven Ashby is a Senior Lecturer at the University of York. He is a medieval archeologist specializing in the archeology of portable material culture and the use of animal products in craft and industry. He recently recorded two series of documentaries in support of the History Channel’s popular drama Vikings.

Alison Leonard

Alison Leonard specializes in Viking Archeology with a focus on artifacts and coinage. She has extensive teaching experience at the universities of York and Cambridge.

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by Bradley Hart

In 1933, a former Hollywood screenwriter-turned-mystic named William Dudley Pelley made a startling public announcement. During a trance four years earlier, Pelley claimed, he had received some startling news from his spiritual contacts. The world was about to be plunged into economic chaos. From that crisis, an important new world leader would emerge. Pelley would know him by his former profession: The leader in question would previously have worked as a house painter. When that leader had obtained power, the prophecy concluded, Pelley was ordained to create his own so-called Christian Militia and make preparations to seize power in the United States. With the recent rise of former painter Adolf Hitler to the Chancellorship of Germany, Pelley now announced, the time had come for him to make a play on the national stage through his new organization, the Silver Legion. Over the coming years, the Legion would become one of the most bizarre—and terrifying—groups looking to emulate Hitler’s Germany in the United States.

William Dudley Pelley’s career had been fraught with controversy long before he founded the Silver Legion. He was born in Massachusetts in 1890 as the son of a Methodist pastor. A voracious reader and writer, the young Pelley began publishing his own journal in 1909. Many of his early writings focused on the role of religion in society. He came to the view that Christianity would need to change if it were to remain relevant in the modern world. Later he turned to fiction and a career in journalism. In 1918, he embarked on an ill-timed reporting assignment in China and India with his young wife, and they were soon stranded in Japan due to wartime travel restrictions.

Yet this soon yielded a life-changing opportunity for Pelley. In mid-1918, President Woodrow Wilson ordered thousands of American troops into Siberia to fight Bolshevik forces in the Russian Civil War—a part of American history we often forget about today. To aid these soldiers, the YMCA pledged to provide humanitarian assistance, and one of the group’s primary volunteer recruiting grounds was Japan. Pelley signed up, and found himself traveling across Siberian wilderness. Along the way he filed reports for the Associated Press. In the course of the war, Pelley developed a deep-seated hatred of Communism—and the Jews he increasingly thought were behind it — that would influence his later activities.

This was a man who could clearly command a fanatical following.

After the war, Pelley returned to the U.S. and embarked on a career in the burgeoning movie industry. In 1921 he sold one of his stories to a movie studio and, after divorcing his wife, moved to Hollywood. He would end up writing or assisting on nearly two dozen films, giving him a small fortune and access to all the fun Hollywood had to offer a young, recently-divorced man. Yet the excitement was short-lived. By 1927 Pelley fell into some kind of personal crisis. He left Hollywood, moved to a small house in Altadena, and began reevaluating his life. Around the same time, he began railing about Jews in the movie industry who he thought were mistreating him. In May 1928, Pelley reported having the first of his spiritual visions. After feeling as if he was being carried through some kind of a mist, Pelley recounted waking up on a marble slab next to two men who began revealing the secrets of the universe to him.  Among these was the revelation that death was only temporary and that all human beings are reincarnated to proceed up a ladder to higher existence. Even more importantly, Pelley reported, the men told him that he would receive additional revelations in the future. The next day, Pelley said he felt better than he had in years and appeared physically younger to his friends. Over the coming months, Pelley reported having more visions and experimented with trendy spiritualist techniques including seances and automatic writing. In 1929, Pelley left California for New York and began writing about his experiences. A small circle of followers started coming to him for spiritual advice, and in due course he began publishing a journal that attracted more than 10,000 subscribers. The Hollywood screenwriter and journalist had now become a spiritual guru. In 1931, Pelley founded his own publishing company called the Galahad Press, and opened a small college in Asheville, North Carolina, to spread his teachings.

Continue reading Who Was William Dudley Pelley and the Silver Legion? on the Unknown History channel at Quick and Dirty Tips. Or listen to the full episode below.

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by Joe Starita

On March 14, 1889, Susan La Flesche Picotte received her medical degree—becoming the first Native American doctor in U.S. history. She earned her degree thirty-one years before women could vote and thirty-five years before Indians could become citizens in their own country.

By age twenty-six, this fragile but indomitable Native woman became the doctor to her tribe. Overnight, she acquired 1,244 patients scattered across 1,350 square miles of rolling countryside with few roads. Her patients often were desperately poor and desperately sick—tuberculosis, small pox, measles, influenza—families scattered miles apart, whose last hope was a young woman who spoke their language and knew their customs.

A Warrior of the People is the story of an Indian woman who effectively became the chief of an entrenched patriarchal tribe, the story of a woman who crashed through thick walls of ethnic, racial and gender prejudice, then spent the rest of her life using a unique bicultural identity to improve the lot of her people—physically, emotionally, politically, and spiritually. Keep reading for an excerpt of this moving biography.

* * * * *

The first building to house the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. Image is in the public domain via Wikipedia.

Susan liked people. And she had a genuine hunger for new experiences, to see and do a variety of things, to meet men and women much different from her, men and women who often were just as interested to know more about her, who enjoyed showing off their city to the charming, inquisitive Indian girl from the Great Plains. So during her three years at the Woman’s Medical College, Susan’s social and artistic life blossomed.

It began almost immediately. A few days before Christmas 1886, the well-to-do, well-connected Mrs. Miesse took the youngest daughter of an Omaha Indian chief to see Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera The Mikado, which Susan loved and couldn’t wait to tell her sister Rosalie about. And then Mrs. Miesse’s friend, a theater manager, gave her three tickets to A Wife’s Peril, starring the “Jersey Lily” herself, Lily Langtry, one of the era’s most glamorous stage actresses—and of course she gave one to Susan, and soon they were transfixed watching. “I can say now I have seen a beautiful woman,” Susan flatly declared afterward. Then one week it was off to see Hannah Whitall Smith, among the celebrated temperance speakers of the day, and another week Miss Haynes sent her a ticket to hear the Germania Orchestra, said to be the city’s finest. And then came an invitation to journey out to Girard College to watch more than one thousand boys drill in parade formation, and Susan couldn’t quite fathom the splendor of so many buildings inspired by Grecian architecture, including one modeled after the Parthenon. Then it was off to see another play, The Little Tycoon, and then an invitation to attend a standing-room-only Sunday service in the city’s grand Catholic cathedral, with its gorgeous paintings, altars, flowers, and music—which on this day included selections from Handel’s Messiah. Then around Thanksgiving, Mrs. Clarkman escorted Susan to the Academy of Fine Arts, where the marble staircase, the huge orchestra, and all the violins and flutes and horns and her personal favorite, the mandolin, overwhelmed her. And then they walked to the academy’s galleries of paintings and sculptures, and she couldn’t quite comprehend the magnificence of all the Benjamin West paintings, including The Death of General Wolfe and Christ Rejected, which was Jane Austen’s favorite. They had entered the academy at four p.m. and thought they had been inside no more than ninety minutes. They were surprised to discover it was six forty-five p.m. when they finally left.

With each passing month, when Susan wasn’t exploring the city’s vast fine arts world or immersed in coursework, she was often with her classmates, young women her own age who were quickly becoming her friends. After about five months, she finally mastered Philadelphia’s complex streetcar system, and after her first-year exams were over, she and “some of the girls” set off on an extended tourist excursion through the City of Brotherly Love. Before it ended, they had visited Old Swedes’ Church, the Delaware River, Philadelphia City Hall, Ben Franklin’s grave, and Independence Hall.

But no matter how much art, architecture, music, and society she absorbed, Susan never lost sight of who she was or where she came from. And she always looked to maintain a bridge to her people and traditions wherever and whenever she could. The nearby Lincoln Institute, a post–Civil War orphanage, was filled with Indian children, so Susan often went to see them. The Educational Home in West Philadelphia, which she and her friends visited many times, housed a number of Indian boys who “all looked very well & happy,” she was delighted to tell her family. One February day, about 130 Carlisle Indian boys and girls teamed up with some Hampton Indian students for a concert, and Susan made sure she was there to see and hear them. She was proud that so many of those students were from her tribe, and she made it a point to tell Rosalie that “the Omahas have high standing at both schools.”

If Susan sought cultural sustenance and inspiration in the hallways of the local Indian orphanages and boys’ homes, her attentions were reciprocated. Not long into her medical studies, her name began to crop up in Indian school publications and conversations, a name increasingly held up as a motivational tool, a role model for others to aspire to. Soon after the joint band concert, Susan described the reaction she got from some of the younger Omaha students. “I think they must have been so glad to see me and I think my graduation honors at [Hampton] must have made them feel so proud of me,” she told Rosalie. The Carlisle school newspaper described her as one of Hampton’s most gifted students, and most of their students knew she had received the gold medal and finished second in her graduating class.

When the younger Indian musicians arrived in Philadelphia for the concert, Susan said, “The boys were kind of glad to see me there as the Omaha girl who was studying medicine.” A few years later, Talks and Thoughts, a newspaper edited and published by Hampton’s Indian students, ran a small reminiscence that began: “Sometimes when we are skipping around in Winona we remember one sweet-faced Hampton sister Susie, who used to help us so much with our games.” The paper noted how far Susie had come since her Hampton days, how she might one day even have her own hospital, and how high she had set the bar for all the other Indian students. “There is not much use trying to be as smart as she is,” the paper concluded, “but I guess it wouldn’t hurt us to try and be as good.”

And wherever she went, whether it was Hampton or the orphanages, to the home for boys or throughout Philadelphia, there was always the question of identity—about how people see themselves, how others see them, about who gets to decide, who gets to choose the cultural attributes that people select to create identities for themselves and for others—that kept cropping up again and again, in different places, at different times, in different ways.

JOE STARITA was the New York Bureau Chief for Knight-Ridder newspapers and a veteran investigative reporter for The Miami Herald. His stories have won more than two dozen awards, one of which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for local reporting. For the last nine years, he has held an endowed chair at the University of Nebraska’s College of Journalism. The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge won the MPIBA Award and received a second Pulitzer nomination. He is also the author of “I am a Man.”

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by Bradley Hart

On the Fourth of July, 1937, a group of Americans gathered in the town of Yaphank, Long Island, to celebrate the country’s birthday. Many of the traditional elements of Americana were present, including picnic baskets, beer, and the inevitable fireworks. Yet there were some unusual elements as well. Some of those in attendance were in uniform, but not the uniform of the U.S. Army. More than 300 men in silver-gray shirts with black ties and Sam Browne belts that passed over their right shoulders, and others in black shirts, goose-stepped past the stage and saluted their leaders with extended right arms. A huge swastika adorned the stage next to the American flag. The usual patriotic speeches focused not only on the United States, but also several of its soon-to-be-enemies. Cries of “Heil Hitler!” and “Heil Mussolini!” filled the summer air.

This was the Fourth of July celebrated in the style of the German American Bund, once the country’s leading organization for German sympathizers and Nazi imitators. Though nearly forgotten today, the Bund once boasted a nation-wide membership in the thousands and had chapters in nearly every major American city. Millions more saw newsreel footage of goose-stepping Bund members mimicking Hitler’s stormtroopers or read newspaper exposés about the Bund’s secret training camps for children and adults alike. In Washington, politicians and law enforcement officials wondered what the Bund’s leaders might be plotting.

Yet despite its undeniable popularity for some Americans, and the public outcry it generated, the Bund never came close to fulfilling the ambitions of its leaders. In part, this was thanks to the courageous infiltration of the group by an enterprising Chicago journalist who risked life and limb to expose what the Bund was up to. His name was John C. Metcalfe, and we’ll return to his story in a moment.

The German American Bund was founded in 1936 and led by a German immigrant—and naturalized American citizen—named Fritz Kuhn. In theory, the Bund was merely an organization of German Americans who wanted to stay in touch with their former homeland. In reality, the Bund had been created from the remains of an organization called Friends of the New Germany that had openly supported Adolf Hitler and his plans for the Third Reich. That organization was shut down when the German government decided it was too disreputable and might endanger Germany’s relations with the U.S. The Bund was therefore supposed to be a more respectable way for German Americans to stay in touch with their former country—but also show support for its new leader, Hitler.

In reality, the Bund’s ideology was more closely aligned with the Reich than its leaders wanted to admit. Fritz Kuhn himself was a World War I veteran who had won the Iron Cross. After the war he joined the Nazi Party and brawled with Communists on the streets of Munich. He later claimed to have been present for the failed Beer Hall Putsch that landed Hitler in prison. In 1923 he moved to Mexico and later settled in Detroit, where he worked for the Ford Motor Company. According to one account, he was fired from the job when management discovered him practicing political speeches while on the clock. (Relevant aside: Stay tuned to episode 4 of this miniseries to learn about Henry Ford and his obsession with Nazism.)

Continue reading Who Was Fritz Kuhn and the German American Bund? on the Unknown History channel at Quick and Dirty Tips. Or listen to the full episode below.

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